I've just read Bill's question re. changing settings with Maxthon, and it sort of reminded me about what happened when I went to use MW earlier on.

The page usually comes up showing fonts, styles, size etc. at the top, but this time it didn't, and although it's come back to what I'm used to again, I wondered if there's some way that the page can be remembered for if it happens in the future. Initially, nothing I clicked onto brought up what I'm used to seeing. I then switched everything off because I was busy with other things, and having just tried it again, all's "back to normal" again.

I haven't used MS Word in about ten years, but I can make a general statement about such programs. The things you see when a document opens can be preset and fixed. I'm sure you can bring it back to what you are accustomed to seeing, but I personally can't tell you how to do it in Word. Look for settings/preferences as they relate to toolbars.

Hi Yogi, and thanks, but this's the thing - I can't see anywhere which says settings or preferences, otherwise I'd have clicked onto it to see if I could do anything. There's something which says "View", but I think that just applies to how the page looks once you've typed in whatever, not the visible options/settings at the top.

I looked in on it again earlier, and everything's looking OK at the moment, but something's going a bit awry anyway. Earlier, I was waiting for the google search box to pop up in Firefox, and to my amazement, it disappeared within 2 seconds and a page that my son has set up on his computer to show a list of homework came up instead! HP's just run a test to make sure that everything's working OK, which it seems to be, and as far as I can tell, I haven't got any viruses or threats, so I'm wondering why incorrect or altered pages're loading. : (

Hi IceyThe latest release of FireFox has a few resurrected bugs from eons ago.One of those is it does not close the last accessed website or page view.Another, that drives us Linux users batty. Upon closing FireFox, it uses up half or more of the CPU doing nothing.We have to go into HTOP to KILL FireFox to keep the computer's CPU from overheating.Mozilla knows they reintroduced this old bug again, so we are looking for an update to correct it.Google Chrome has turned its back on Linux users again. And although many of us still use Google Chrome, we consider it one of the nastiest slaps in the face they can give.You see, Google Chrome is built on the Linux Chromium Web Browser. All Google did was add a few bells and whistles to make the Open Source web browser their own exclusive Proprietary web browser. Which goes against ALL of the licensing agreements associated with most open source software. They BIT the hand that fed them!

"HP's just run a test to make sure that everything's working OK, which it seems to be, and as far as I can tell, I haven't got any viruses or threats, so I'm wondering why incorrect or altered pages're loading."

You don't want to know the answer to that. :lol:

One possible explanation is that you are having DNS lookup problems. DNS stands for Domain Name System which is just a lookup table on somebody's server out in Internet-land. When you send out an address for a web page, like http://neo.brainformation.com/, the DNS server translates that into an IP address. It then forwards your request to that IP address. If the lookup tables are not functioning properly, or if your DNS setup has been compromised by some nasty person trying to redirect your traffic to some other place, you will get the kind of weirdness that you are describing. There are other reason for this to happen, but a corrupt DNS server is fairly common cause.

I think you can understand all that, but to fix the problem is another story. I'm not sure what HP tested, but you certainly would need a technician if you are having DNS problems.

The "View" settings generally are check boxes for you to click on, or not. The views often involve menus to be displayed at your discretion. Once you click the boxes you want, they should not change. If yours are changing all by themselves, then I'd suspect some kind of system problem. This and the possible DNS problem might suggest some memory cells, either on your hard drive or RAM, are defective. It might be a good idea to check out your memory and hard drive for memory integrity.

Groan, but thank you Yogi. I'll have a look in the "View" settings then. It's one I didn't bother with because I thought it just applied to the actual page set-up (where you type). I like using MW, and've had no problems with it before, but I'm obviously not as familiar with it as I thought (no surprise there then!).

As I think you know, my computer's linked to others outside of the county, and I HAD been using the TOR browser beforehand, so I don't know if that had anything to do with the irritating problems.

Gary - thank you, but even if a Firefox bug didn't close the last accessed page or page view, the previous time I went onto MW, my usual set-up was visible as normal. It was just this one time when I lost the ability to change fonts, sizes and so on. I forget what was actually up there now, but it was minus many of the things I use.

The security I have's pretty smart. I don't understand it of course, but it's something which isn't generally available to home computer users. As well as the scheduled HP health check, the computer runs frequent full scans, and although bugs can get through, I don't think I've been aware of any during the few years I've had this latest machine. I'm sure that doesn't mean that a few aren't lurking, but I'll get the whole thing checked over asap with regard to the possible DNS thing that Yogi was describing.

Thank you. I'll let you know if anything else goes wrong, or, if need be, what needed to be fixed.

The thing to remember is that we are talking about two separate issues here. One problem has to do with the menu bars you see in Microsoft word. Easy peasey fix for that. The other issue is bogus web pages (once or many times) in your browser. This could be simple or difficult to resolve.

One moment of enlightenment you provided is that you use the TOR network as part of your security arrangement. This is a network designed to connect you to the Internet via a proxy server. It's a favorite tool of hackers and it is freely available to anyone who is interested in anonymity. Your tech support people might be interested in THIS which is more secure than using TOR stand alone.

I haven't actually used TOR yet, as such - just engaged it (brought it up) and played around on it for a bit. It wasn't as easy to use as I expected it to be, so I reverted back to FF. To be honest, I don't know why I have it there, because it doesn't beat the security system which we have, but probably works in a similar sort of way. If anyone hacked in, there's very little interesting information for anyone to see/use, but I'd read about TOR and decided to try it out.

I'm wondering whether because the machine's hooked up to others elsewhere, that this's why problems may be occurring now and again? I was told that the re-routing system's too "intricate and difficult for me to understand". : (It sure looks like it.

The TAILS system I linked you to is much more than just a connection to the TOR network. It's an entire Debian Linux based operating system, something Gary would pine over. If you switched, many of your familiar Windows programs would not look and feel the same, and might not even run given the emphasis on anonymity. In any case it sounds like your network is being handled by people who know what they are doing. You could ask them if they know of a reason why FF would be affected by what they are doing.

One of the things FireFox does to improve performance has to do with keeping your active web pages in a cache. That means the last place you visited is stored in memory. This is true even when you use several tabs. Each tab is stored away in cache memory. When you first turn on Firefox it will display the last page you have viewed - that assumes you configured it to do that. If you have been using several tabs, only the last one viewed will be fired up when you first turn on Firefox. Thus no time is wasted loading pages in those other tabs until you actually open the tab.

While all this caching of pages makes Firefox boot up faster, it could get a little annoying when the page you viewed last has changed in your absence. That is exactly what happens here at Brainformation. Take our index page as an example. That might be the last page you saw before you turned off your computer. The next day that exact same page reappears when you start Firefox, but people have posted over night. Thus the real index page is not what you are seeing until you refresh it. Then, instead of a page full of ice maiden posts, some pilvikki's might magically appear. Vikki did some posting in your absence and the page changed on our server, but did not change in your Firefox browser.

Mozilla says it's a small price to pay for getting their browser to boot up faster. Well, I beg to differ with them because other browsers don't have that problem. LOL

And, if by some odd chance Gary is reading this, I opened up FireFox (ver. 27) in my Linux operating system, then I issued a command line TOPS instruction. I had seven tabs open and Firefox idled around 3%-4% in terms of CPU time. There were instantaneous peaks up to 34% but by and large CPU time consumed by Firefox was well under 5%. I closed Firefox and all it's processes dropped off the TOPS list and freed up the processor time instantly. No swap space was ever used, and the 4GB of RAM was hardly used. Thus I don't quite understand why you are experiencing memory unloading problems and run away processor cycles. Then again, I'm using Ubuntu 12.04 (LTS) for all this. That might have something to do with it.

Hi Yogi - It doesn't happen all the time. But did again last night, and I forgot to check my CPU usage before leaving my office for the night. The computer didn't crash from overheating as it sometimes does. But the dual core CPU was running at 50%, which means one core was running at 100% the other at idle.The first thing I did was open HTOP and sure enough, it was Firefox. I gave it the old F-9 to Kill it, then went to another computer to let this one cool down for an hour.

I have three computers running Debian Squeeze, and the latest upgrade of Firefox does it on all three of them.This usually happens when you EXIT Firefox. Apparently while it is doing its cleanup during shut down, it begins to run something heavy and never stops.

Opening and closing Firefox only opens another instance of Firefox.Very rarely, when I go to open Firefox, I will get a message saying I have to close Firefox first. But on these instances, there is not one eating up the CPU, but going to HTOP shows a copy is running, but idle. I kill it and then can open Firefox.

Although Google Chrome no longer supports Linux users, it is still my current browser of choice. I used to use Chromium first, but Google added some bells and whistles I used often. So leaned toward it the most.I've tried most of the others, like Epiphany, IceWeasel, etc. but find many incompatibilities with programs I need to use for work. They work in Google Chrome just fine, but not all of them in Chromium. If I use Firefox, they all work, but a few not in exactly the same way. So they take longer.Then too, I have one work program I use near the end of the day, or late afternoon, that only works on Firefox. It is our nightly report and data exchange transfers. Not data from their computers to mine per se. Think of it more like account settings on their server. It where I check my time on each project and fill out my nightly report, by copying data to my accounting sheets in order to get paid. They do it automatically internally, but they make us copy the data from one sheet to another as a double checksum I guess.

It doesn't matter if I visited them last, or Farcebook last. I have to remember to glance up at my CPU usage monitor to see if Firefox shut down after a about 30 seconds to a minute. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. This happened once a few upgrades back, and they fixed it right away with another upgrade.Now it seems more intermittent. Doesn't do it all the time. But by Murphy's Law, if you forget to check the monitor to make sure it shut down. That is the time it don't, hi hi...

On a side note: I just learned Comcast upped our Internet Only Cable Connection from an exorbitant 76 bucks a month to a massive price gouging 97 bucks a month. NO TV, NO PHONE, Internet ONLY.I guess I'm STUCK, because they host my websites and I did not use my own domain names when I moved over to them.My cost was 29.95 per month when I signed up about five years ago. (Actually 19.95 per month for the first six months, then jumped to the regular price of 29.95 per month).

As an aside: Eons ago, I did have a domain name for one of my businesses. This allowed me to move around to different providers without losing my followers. The side affect of this was, when I moved to a different provider, the old provide charged me 40 bucks, plus 9.95 per month for a year. Then they would drop redirects.I always thought it was the DNS servers or something, that took care of routing to IP addresses. So by having my own domain name, I could move anywhere without a problem.

Others told me I should not have paid my old provider the fee or the monthly charge.I was already like six months after the fact. But I had another domain name with them also.I moved it to a new provider and did not pay the fee. Hits to that website dropped to zilch.Reason: My old provider was not redirecting.

After I checked into it. Turns out I did not have my own domain name after all.What I had was a unique domain name assigned by them. Not from ICANN.If I remember correctly, my provider OWNED my domain name and I had a discounted second nameserver account.What this basically meant, is the name was now in use and I could not obtain it through any Official Registrar.In other words, I got hornswaggled big time, hi hi...I don't think any providers work this way anymore, unless they are less than reputable, like the first provider I hosted a domain on. Lessons learned...

Gary -You and I are seeing two different Foxfire's. The one I'm seeing seems to be much better behaved. There are a number of intrinsic differences to account for the different behaviors; one is the distribution of Linux and the other is the add-ons. Either, both, or something more can cause the process lockup that you are seeing.

You are correct about an old problem where Foxfire was having problems releasing memory after shutting down. It's been remedied many generations ago and I'm not aware of it recurring any time recently. Some people like yourself may still be seeing the problem, but I'd guess it has to do with what you are adding to the browser and the OS. As far as I can tell Foxfire is well behaved in the Lunux OS's I use.

It's my humble opinion that Foxfire has issues in Windows, which is what prompted me to switch channels. I'm now running the Nightly build and seldom see anything out of the ordinary. When something does go haywire, it's usually fixed in a day or two.

There are two Linux versions of Google's Chrome OS. The Chrome Browser runs fine in both of them. Then again I'm not pushing the limits of the browser nor trying to do anything more than what is installed as default. If you really need to use Chrome, the best shot you have is to install a VM version in your Linux OS. I also run the Chrome browser in Windows 7 and do all this site's administration chores from therein. Aside from the quirky way they handle bookmarks, I think Chrome for Windows is the next best thing after Chrome in its native environment.